Recently, in India, there was an issue connected with JNU (Jawaharlal Nehru University). It became public issue because it concerned not only with the free speech rights of students, law and order dimensions, national security issues necessitating court’s intervention etc. but also it sought to portray the superiority of the ideology of Leftism (based on the philosophy of Karl Marx), raising an intellectual banner of revolution. This article addresses the intellectual aspect of this issue.

This article is divided into three parts.

The first part deals with the human tendency to understand things around them and to put this understanding of world (Nature) in some coherent order (i.e. in a theoretical manner; ideology; philosophy).

The second part deals with the Marxian philosophy, under which banner Leftists politicians (Sitaram Yeturi and tribe), historians (Romila Thapar and tribe), intellectuals (JNU’s Kanhaya Kumar and company) and other sundry secularists of various hues opetate in India.

The third part deals with the “Sacred Secrets of this Infinite Universe” in the words of Sri aurobindo.

PART ONE:

As rational beings, we humans always try to understand Nature in a reasoned manner. This rational attitude has given us endless streams of human thinking. It has given us many religions, spiritual visions, philosophies, ideologies and branches of modern science.

In their quest for knowing the reality of Nature, humans acquire knowledge.

Whatever we are today, is the outcome of the acquisition of the knowledge about this reality. What is the state of our knowledge about the reality today?

We have many religions, spiritual visions, philosophies, ideologies and branches of modern science, all competing for the place of the “correct” enunciation of the reality.

Unfortunately, these diverse religions, spiritual visions, philosophies, ideologies and branches of modern science do not agree on many things with each other while enunciating this reality.

The coveted place, the crown of the correct enunciation of the reality, is extremely narrow: it can accommodate only “one” title to the claim. The “truth or reality” can be only one.

Fortunately, lately the humanity has come to realize (by the discovery the theory of Relativity by Elbert Einstein) that the “reality” is not absolutely “one”; that the reality has relative values; that “all” relative values of the reality, which values differ with one another, are correct ones.

This new realization of truth by humanity in modern times was not totally unknown to us in the past. Long back, it was said, “The truth is one; but wise people say it differently – satya ekam; vipra bahuda vadanti”.

The greatest advantage of the correct understanding of Nature is that with the aid of this knowledge, we can make deduction about the things, happenings or events that “will”, as against “may”, taken place in future. Having this advantage, we can re-engineer the future or get ready to face it in a prepared manner.

One thing that strikes one’s mind, while going through all these past attempts to understand and resolve conflicts, is that almost all religious sages, philosophers, intellectual thinkers and scientists talk of some kind of a “conflict of duality”.

It seems that these two elements inherent in Nature are opposite or antagonist to one another; still these opposite elements are complementary to one another; they create conflict with one another but make a harmonious balance to the whole structure.

In modern times, Hegel was the first person to formulate precisely the laws of working of Nature under the name Dialectics.

And Karl Marx was the first person to popularize Dialectics by putting its foundation on Matter and by showing that its principles governed the working of Nature.

The science and technologies never stop growing. They make humans’ life comfortable. But they also make a burial ground of obsolete things and obsolete ideas. Old things and old ideas go out of fashion and new things and new ideas take their place.

Marxism, as a philosophical system to understand Nature and Nature’s basic working principles, and an inevitable advent in society of Communism as the product of the working of those principles had stirred humanity to its core in the 20th century. Till recently, this exposition had captured the imagination of the best of human minds.

The appeal of this idea was greatly augmented by the political events of the October 1917 Russian Revolution and the establishment of the Soviet Union; revolutions in China and Cuba; and several other countries.

With the disintegration of the Soviet Union and China taking the road of capitalist economy, the intellectual appeal of Marxism has almost died. Though still in many countries political movements and armed struggles under the banner of Marxism are going on {like CPI (Maoist) in India}, their intellectual sheen is nowhere in existence.

As a philosophical construct and political ideology, Marxism no longer attracts the best minds in explaining the new realities of the modern world. Even, it is not able to explain in its philosophic constructs the demise of Soviet Union or, say, China taking the capitalist road.

This inability of 20th century Marxism has emboldened all sorts of petty philosophers to attack Marxism as a concept and nibble its disjointed pillars.

Marxism of 20th century has not grown to adapt the 21st century and explain the new realities in terms of its basic principles. Feeble Marxists have been tinkering much with its old mold to explain away the realities of the new world but do not dare to grow any further and make bold assertions in terms of its pristine understanding of Nature in terms of Thesis, Anti-thesis, Synthesis; Change from Quantity to Quality; Negation of Negation; Spiral Evolution etc.

Before setting out the basic premises – philosophical foundation – of Marxian Dialectical Materialism, we would like to add here that the assault on Marxism by the whole horde of capitalist intellectuals, or if you love to call them philosophers, is ill-motivated; selfish; and anything but philosophical.

And, we would also like to add that in challanging the substance of Dialectical Materialism of Karl Marx, Spiritualism is much more plane, honest and profound than this ill-motivated criticism by such capitalist intellectuals.

PART TWO:

Marxian concept of dialectics in its abstract form may be summed up thus:

There is nothing in Nature that may be called an absolute truth; all human concepts about natural phenomena are relative in their contents.

Whole Nature is in motion; no part of it is static.

This motion is generated by a mechanism that is brought about by the inherent irreconcilable contradictions inherently present in every entity, or constituent, of Nature.

These contradictions give birth to conflicts that distort the harmonious structure of that entity. These conflicts accumulate in the quantitative form in that entity up to a certain limit. This limit is the critical point up to which these conflicts can be accommodated by that entity without changing its nature or quality. The moment these conflicts cross this critical limit, the quality of that entity changes or an upheaval takes place and the old entity becomes qualitatively different thing.

This process of change never stops in Nature, whether one likes it or not. This process is termed by Marx, and his friend F. Engles, ‘Negation of Negation’. Here, a thing comes into being or takes its birth by negating a thing that was having a well-established place and this new thing, after enjoying a well- established place for certain time, is itself negated by a new thing. Over a period of time this pattern of change appears to human mind as spiral evolution.

This dialectical process is an integral part of Nature’s function. Though the general principles of dialectics operate with mathematical accuracy, in their detailed applications they operate in very flexible manner, depending on so many factors; nonetheless, in overall contours they always operate with mathematical accuracy. This faithful accuracy of its basic principles and their universality in operation make it possible for dialectics to forecast and predict. These two philosopher revolutionaries devoted their entire life in applying these dialectical principles to physics, anthropology, society, economics and, even, military science. They created a brilliant philosophical edifice called Scientific Socialism or, better known as, Communism.

Fredrick Engles says: “Outlines of the General Plan (for the application of dialectics to Nature): (1 ).. (2)…. (3) Dialectics as the science of universal inter-connection. Main laws: transformation of quantity and quality – mutual penetration of polar opposites and transformation into each other when carried to extremes – development through contradiction or negation of the negation – spiral form of development.”

He further says: “And indeed they (laws of dialectics) can be reduced in the main to three: The law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa; the law of the interpenetration of opposites; the law of the negation of the negation.”

The founders of Marxism claimed that the dialectical process was a universal one, governing from material natural phenomena to the evolution of human society. F. Angles says: “We are not concerned here with writing a handbook of dialectics, but only with showing that the dialectical laws are real laws of development of nature, and therefore, are valid also for theoretical natural science.”

By applying these “laws” to capitalist society, prediction was made that this society would transform, as of necessity under the natural process, into Socialist society and this view of Socialism was dubbed as Scientific Socialism. It was claimed that in due course of time, when old habits of capitalist mentality die under the new social system, Socialism would transform into Communism and state would wither away. It was explained that in socialist society “each would work according to his capacity and get according to his work” while in communist society “each would work according to his capacity and get according to his needs.”

When dialectics is applied to material world in general and history of mankind in particular, a dialectician is faced with the problem of an “irreconcilable” nature.

The dialectical model has a peculiar component of spiral form of its (evolutionary) movement.

When dialectics is applied to human history, it predicts that the ‘primitive Communism’, or the first stage of social evolution of history, would be repeated at higher level of the ‘spiral’ in the form of “scientific Communism’. Marx pointed out that in primitive Communism, there was ‘direct’ struggle of people with Nature as there were two contradictory classes (Nature and mankind), that there were no social class conflicts there and that owing to this absence of social class-conflicts there was no ‘wastage’ of human energy in the form of social class conflicts. He said that, likewise in the ‘modern’ or ‘scientific Communism’ also, there would be ‘direct’ struggle of people with Nature as there would be no two social conflicting classes and no wastage of human energy.

Then, the questions arise: How the ‘modern Communism’ would progress further in the dialectical terms? How the ‘modern Communism’ would become the ‘thesis’ and would bring out as of necessity the ‘two contradictory’ elements, which should already be inherent in it? How would such ‘modern Communism’ be negated and replaced by a new ‘Thesis’ under the law of ‘Negation of Negation’? If we look to the Marxian interpretation of human history, we find that from ‘Primitive Communism’ to ‘modern Communism’ there is one full cycle; the question arises: What consequence would there be after the completion of this one ‘full cycle’ under the law of ‘Spiral Evolution’? Would a ‘direct’ struggle of humans with Nature in modern time affect the very constitution of mankind? Or, in other words, would this process of ‘humanity’s direct struggle with Nature’ change our race into a new or higher race under the law of ‘Spiral Evolution’? Would, then, there be an onset of a ‘new cycle’ of a new ‘social evolution’ of the ‘new humans or trans-humans’? Marxism, or the low crop Marxist philosophers of today, have no inkling that such questions would necessarily arise under their philosophy; and much less they have the intellectual caliber to answer them.

Sri Aurobindo answers such questions in a much more profound way. He inspires a hope for a better future of humanity. Let us see what he says.

PART THREE:

Sri Aurobindo, the great sage, writing in the dominant materialist age, says with a strikingly penetrating depth of mental inquiry: “By that hunger mysticism profits and new religions arise to replace the old that have been destroyed or stripped of significance by skepticism which itself could not satisfy because, although its business was inquiry, it was unwilling sufficiently to inquire. In the corollary of things we are dealing here, the most profound question that has ever been asked and will ever be asked is who, why and when initiated this universal evolution? And, mind’s Inquisitiveness logically further asks how the universe stood before this initiation?

“Answers to these questions are the most sacred secrets of Nature.

“We speak of the evolution of Life in Matter, the evolution of Mind in Matter; but evolution is a word, which merely states the phenomenon without explaining it. For there seems to be no reason why Life should evolve out of material elements or Mind out of living form, unless we accept the Vedantic solution that Life is already involved in Matter and Mind in Life because in essence Matter is a form of veiled Life, Life a form of veiled Consciousness.

“And then there seems to be little objection to a farther step in the series and the admission that mental consciousness may itself be only a form and a veil of higher states which are beyond Mind. In that case, the unconquerable impulse of man towards God, Light, Bliss, Freedom, Immortality presents itself in its right place in the chain as simply the imperative impulse by which Nature is seeking to evolve beyond Mind, and appears to be as natural, true and just as the impulse towards Life which she has planted in certain forms of Matter or the impulse towards Mind which she has planted in certain forms of Life. As there, so here, the impulse exists more or less obscurely in her different vessels with an ever-ascending series in the power of its will-to-be; as there, so here, it is gradually evolving and bound fully to evolve the necessary organs and faculties.”

Sri Aurobindo says: “The average human being even now is in his inward existence as crude and undeveloped as was the bygone primitive man in his outward life. But as soon as we go deep within ourselves, – and Yoga means a plunge into all the multiple profundities of the soul. – we find ourselves subjectively… surrounded by a whole complex world which we have to know and to conquer.

“The most disconcerting discovery is to find that every part of us – intellect, will, sense-mind, nervous or desire-self, the heart, the body – has each, as it were, its own complex individuality and natural formation independent of the rest; it neither agrees with itself nor with the others nor with the representative ego which is the shadow cast by some central and centralizing self on our superficial ignorance.

“We find that we are composed not of one but many personalities and each has its own demands and differing nature. … We find that inwardly too, no less than outwardly, we are not alone in the world; the sharp separateness of our ego was no more than a strong imposition and delusion; we do not exist in ourselves, we do not really live apart in an inner privacy or solitude. Our mind is a receiving, developing and modifying machine into which there is being constantly passed from moment to moment a ceaseless foreign flux, a streaming mass of disparate materials from above, from below, from outside.

“Much more than half our thoughts and feelings are not our own in the sense that they take form out of ourselves; of hardly anything can it be said this is truly original to our nature. A large part comes to us from others or from the environment, whether as raw material or as manufactured imports; but still more largely they come from universal Nature here or from other worlds and planes and their beings and powers and influences; for we are overtopped and environed by other planes of consciousness, mind planes, life planes, subtle matter planes, from which our life and action here are fed, or fed on, pressed, dominated, made use of for the manifestation of their forms and forces.”

In one of his numerous letters to his disciples written in answer to their queries, Sri Aurobindo says: “I mean by the psychic the inmost soul-being and the soul-nature. This is not the sense in which the word is used in ordinary parlance, or rather, if it is so used, it is with great vagueness and much-misprision of the true nature of this soul and it is given a wide extension of meaning which carries it far beyond that province. All phenomena of an abnormal or supernormal psychological or an occult character are dubbed psychic… though these things have nothing whatever to do with the psychic….. There is a constant confusion between the mentalised desire-soul which is a creation of the vital urge in man, of his life-force seeking for its fulfillment and the true soul which is a spark of the Divine Fire, a portion of the Divine. Because the soul, the psychic being uses the mind and the vital as well as the body as instruments for growth and experience, it is itself looked at as if it were some amalgam or some subtle substratum of mind and life. But in Yoga if we accept all this chaotic mass as soul-stuff or soul-movement we shall enter into confusion without an issue.”

He says in another of his letters: “What is meant in the terminology of the yoga by the psychic is the soul element in the nature, the pure psyche or divine nucleus which stands behind mind, life and body (it is not the ego) but of which we are only dimly aware. It is a portion of the divine and permanent from life to life, taking the experience of life through its outer instruments (i.e. mind, vital and physical body).

“People do not understand what I mean by the psychic being, because the word psychic has been used in English to mean anything of the inner mental, inner vital or inner physical or anything abnormal or occult or even the more subtle movements of the outer being, all in a jumble; also occult phenomena are often called psychic.

“The distinction between these parts of the being is unknown. Even in India the old knowledge of the Upanishads in which they are distinguished has been lost. The Jivatman, the psychic being (Purusha Antaratman), the Manomaya Purusha, the Pranmaya Purusha are all confused together.

“The psychic part of us is something that comes direct from the Divine and is in touch with the Divine. In its origin it is the nucleus pregnant with the divine possibilities that supports this lower triple manifestation of mind, life and body.

“There is this divine element in all living beings, but it stands hidden behind the ordinary consciousness, is not at first developed and, even when developed, is not always or often in the front; it expresses itself, so far as the imperfection of the instruments allows, by their mean and under their limitations. It grows in the consciousness by Godward experience, gaining strength every time there is a higher movement in us, and, finally, by the accumulation of these deeper and higher movements, there is developed a psychic individuality, – that which we call usually the psychic being. It is always this psychic being that is the real, though often the secret cause of man’s turning to the spiritual life and his greatest help in it. It is therefore that which we have to bring from behind to the front in the Yoga…..

“The psychic being may be described in Indian language as the Purusha in the heart or the Chaitya Purusha, but the inner or secret heart must be understood, hrdaye guhayam, not the outer vital-emotional centre.”

The Mother in answer to the question: “Are the soul and the psychic being one and the same thing” says thus: “This depends on the definition you give to the words. In most religions, and perhaps in most philosophies also, it is the vital being which is called “soul”, for it is said that “the soul leaves the body”, while it is the vital being which leaves the body. One speaks of “saving the soul”… but all that applies to the vital being, for the psychic being has no need to be saved! It does not share the faults of the external person; it is free from all reaction.”

Sri Aurobindo says: “At a certain stage in the Yoga when the mind is sufficiently quieted and no longer supports itself at every step on the sufficiency of its mental certitude, when the vital has been steadied and subdued and is no longer constantly insistent on its own rash will, demand and desire, when the physical has been sufficiently altered not to bury altogether the inner flame under the mass of its outward ness, obscurity or inertia, an inmost being hidden within and felt only in its rare influences is able to come forward and illumine the rest and take up the lead of the Sadhana Its action is like a searchlight showing up all that has to be changed in the nature; it has in it a flame of will insistent on perfection, on an alchemic transmutation of all the inner and outer existence. It sees the divine essence everywhere but rejects the mere mask and the disguising figure.”

He further says: “What is meant by (the psychic’s) coming to the front is simply this. The psychic ordinarily is deep within. Very few people are aware of their souls – when they speak of their soul, they usually mean the vital + mental being or else the (false) soul of desire.

“The psychic remains behind and acts only through the mind, vital and physical wherever it can. For this reason the psychic being except where it is very much developed has only a small and partial, concealed and mixed or diluted influence on the life of most men. By coming forward is meant that it comes from behind the veil, its presence is felt already in the waking daily consciousness, its influence fills, dominates, transforms the mind and vital and their movements, even the physical. One is aware of one’s soul, feels the psychic to be one’s true being, the mind and the rest begin to be only instruments of the inmost within us.”

The Mother says: “In the ordinary life there’s not one person in a million who has a conscious contact with his psychic being, even momentarily. The psychic being may work within, but so invisibly and unconsciously for the outer being that it is as though it did not exist. And in most cases, the immense majority, almost the totality of cases, it is as though it were asleep. Not at all active, (it is) in a kind of torpor.

“It is only with the sadhana and a very persistent effort that one succeeds in having a conscious contact with his psychic being. Naturally, it is possible that there are exceptional cases – but this is truly exceptional, and they are so few that they could be counted – where the psychic being is an entirely formed, liberated being, master of itself, which has chosen to return to earth in a human body in order to do its work. …

“In almost, almost all cases, a very sustained effort is needed to become aware of one’s psychic being. Usually it is considered that if one can do it in thirty years one is very lucky – thirty years of sustained effort, I say. It may happen that it’s quicker. But this is so rare that immediately one says, “This is not an ordinary human being”. That is the case of people who have been considered more or less divine beings and who were great yogis, great initiates.”

Says Sri Aurobindo:“All Yoga is in its nature a new birth; it is a birth out of the ordinary, the mentalised material life of man a higher spiritual consciousness and a greater and diviner being.

“No Yoga can be successfully undertaken and followed unless there is a strong awakening to the necessity of that larger spiritual existence….(T) here must be a decision of the mind and the will and, as its result, a complete and effective self-consecration.

“The mere idea or intellectual seeking of something higher beyond, however strongly grasped by the mind’s interest, is ineffective unless it is seized on by the heart as the one thing desirable and by the will as the one thing to be done.

“He who seeks the Divine must consecrate himself to God and to God only. The secret Teacher, the inner guide is already at work, though he may not yet manifest himself or may not yet appear in the person of his human representative…. (I)f we desire to make the most of the opportunity that this life gives us, if we wish to respond adequately to the call we have received and to attain to the goal we have glimpsed, not merely advance a little towards it, it is essential that there should be an entire self-giving. The secret of success in Yoga is to regard it not as one of the aims to be perused in life, but as the whole of life.”

He further says: “The first necessity is to dissolve that central faith and vision in the mind which concentrate it on its development and satisfaction and interests in the old externalized order of things. … The next need is to compel all our lower being to pay homage to this new faith and greater vision. All our nature must make an integral surrender. Our whole being – soul, mind, sense, heart, will, life, body – must consecrate all its energies so entirely and in such a way that it shall become a fit vehicle for the Divine.

“Everything in us has constantly to be called back to the central faith and will and vision. Every thought and impulse has to be reminded… that ‘That is the divine Brahman and not this which men here adore’.

“Every vital fiber has to be persuaded to accept an entire renunciation of all that hitherto represented to it its own existence.

“(A seeker of spirit) has to harmonize deliberate knowledge with unquestioning faith… the passivity of the soul… has to be fused with the activity of the divine helper and the divine warrior. To him as to all seekers of the spirit there are offered for solution the oppositions of the reason, the clinging hold of the senses, the perturbations of the heart, the ambush of the desires, the clog of the physical body, but he has to deal in another fashion with their mutual and internal conflicts and their hindrance to his aim… “

Sri Aurobindo says: “There must be a flaming concentration of the heart on the All and Eternal and, when once we have found him, a deep plunging and immersion in the possession and ecstasy of the All-Beautiful.

“But on that which as yet we know not how shall we concentrate? And yet we cannot know the Divine unless we have achieved this concentration of our being upon him. It is not enough to devote ourselves by the reading of Scriptures or by the stress of philosophical reasoning to an intellectual understanding of the Divine; for at the end of our long mental labor we might know all that has been said of the Eternal, possess all that can be thought about the Infinite and yet we might not know him at all. . . All that the Light from above asks of us that it may begin its work is a call from the soul and a sufficient point of support in the mind. .. The idea may be and must in the beginning be inadequate; the aspiration may be narrow and imperfect, the faith poorly illumined or even, as not surely founded on the rock of knowledge, fluctuating, uncertain, diminished; often even it may be extinguished and need to be lit again with difficulty like a torch in a windy pass. But if once there is a resolute self consecration from deep within, if there is an awakening to the soul’s call, these inadequate things can be a sufficient instrument for the divine purpose.

“Therefore the wise have always been unwilling to limit man’s avenues towards God; they would not shut against his entry even the narrowest portal, the lowest and darkest postern, the humblest wicket-gate. Any name, any form, any symbol, any offering has been held to be sufficient if there is the consecration along with it; for the Divine knows himself in the heart of the seeker and accepts the sacrifice.”

2+2=4 arithmetical truth is a SCIENCE,EVERYWHERE IN THIS UNIVERSE,be it either in material/worldly or in spiritual religious matters in this EARTHEN UNIVERSE and MARXISM is the same SCIENCE OF THE WORLD but LEFTISM might be superficial and RELIGIONISM might be one part of various parts of SCIENCE OF THE EARTH since The LORD SHIVA,LORD NARAYAN are always WORSHIPPED only BY HINDUS those who belong to SANATAN DHARMAS from transendental periods of SHRISHTY[creation];STHITHI[sustenance/duration] & LAYA[perils of all creation] BUT Lord Christ as worshiped by Christians being the SON OF GOD;JEOVAH WITNESS [mostly in SPAIN] worshippers do not consider themselves to be a Christian so far only they remain to be a WITNESS but BUDDIHISM is worshiped by Buddhists all over the world and Hazrat Muhammed is the ISLAM-RELIGION-CREATOR not being as the only Prophet of Islam-religion and ZENDABESTA for ZOORASTIANISM and MOZES for JEWS,if I am not wrong mentioning straightway…..
Hence, MARXISM IS A SCIENCE OF THE WORLD.

A response:
1. Marxism is science! Saying so is not enough. First question: You don’t say what is Marxism. Please first explain what is Marxism. If not now, read first and then explain. Not an easy task? !!!
2. Marxism is science! What is a ‘science’? Please explain.
3. Marxism is science! O. K. Do you know all scientific concepts – like light, gravity, matter, atom etc. – have been constantly changing over time? History of science is the history of its changing postures. How much Marxism has changed over 100 years? Got the point? Any clue!
4. 2+2=4 is abstraction of 2 things + 2 things = 4 things. Now let us put 2 things with 2 grams of “iron” and also let us put this iron onto a flying space-ship with the “speed of light”. Lo! 2 gram of iron is not 2 gram anymore! Got any clue? This is enough to put “Marxism as a science” = 2 +2 =4.
5. Thanks for comment.